Quick and Dirty Timelapse Photography
Posted by aonomus on June 15, 2009
So as I prep for a roadtrip, the thought of timelapse occured to me. I have already made some random timelapse test videos using my old Canon Powershot A40 and the software that came with it, however portability was always an issue.
Today, that is no longer an issue, I built in a few hours a frame to hold my old camera and a servo motor, and controlled the entire setup using a Arduino. The setup includes a LCD for display purposes, but in general is meant to quickly satisfy the need to do timelapse for the roadtrip drive. I plan to improve this a little bit, perhaps add a LM317 vreg so the entire setup is self-contained and powered off a 12V wall-wart or battery pack, however time is at a premium.
Procrastinatus 
Ted said
Very cool solution if your camera doesn’t have plug for external triggering. Is it possible to send me the circuit setup and the Arduino code from this project ? Do you think I could do this with those cheap, blue transparent servos ? Thanks in advance,
Ted
aonomus said
You could likely manage it with the micro sized servos, although you may have a lower lifecycle on them; as an upshot you would have lower power requirements during actuation.
Unfortunately I never really documented this project beyond the video, it was very slapdash. The code is somewhere lost in an old backup buried under a few tiers of folders and I couldn’t look it up. As for the schematic, it probably wouldn’t do you any good as I do recall I had to re-write part of the LCD4Bit library (temporarily) to use different pins than the default ones so that I could use the servo library as well. Sorry I can’t be of more help.